This is the 11th year that the Town of Groton has sponsored the Annual Verne Morton Memorial Photography Show & Contest, which is produced by April Schefffler, Town Clerk, and Robin Cargian, Deputy Town Clerk.  It is made sponsored by the Town of Groton and made possible in part by a grant from the Tompkins County Tourism Program.

Verne Morton was born in Groton in 1868.  He began his photographic career in 1896, and spent the next 49 years taking more than 12,000 awesome pictures of rural life in upstate New York.  Morton was the son of a farmer who grew up to be a schoolteacher.  He loved of the nature and almost half of his photographs are of plants and animals.  Many of these photographs were used in books published by Cornell’s College of Agriculture and other nature books. Other Morton subjects include the people and activities of the rural world in which he lived: farmers stacking hay; beekeepers extracting honey from a comb; children running in a schoolyard; a young woman feeding turkeys outside a barn.  It is interesting to see the changes that Morton’s images document such as automobiles replacing carriages and sleighs and tractors replacing horse-drawn plows. You can see Verne Morton’s extraordinary photographs in two books:  Images of Rural Life and Great Possibilities.  Many of his photos are also on display at The History Center in Tompkins County in Ithaca.

This photography show continues the Verne Morton legacy of appreciating the grace, beauty and art that surrounds us every day, right outside our windows.  The photos that you and others have submitted is the beginning of a new documentation of our life as it exists today in Groton so that someday, when today is a distant memory, someone will remember who we were.